Immediately after I arranged the appointment, I started regretting my decision. I got morose and asked my kids, “how will you feel when I’m gone? Are you going to miss me?”
K. said, “Stop the guilt trips. You and the kids went to the
dentist in the height of the pandemic, when there were no vaccines, so why stop
now?”
I replied, “but now it seems different. With all the media
focusing on Delta’s high infectiousness and death toll and images of burning
funeral pyres on new delhi streets… it seems like it’s more dangerous….”
“so why are you going to the dentist?”
“I wouldn’t have gone, but you kept glancing at the stains
on my teeth.”
Everyone laughed nervously when I start pinning the cause of
my impending demise on K’s criticisms of my dental situation. We live in dark
times, and my humor is darker.
Life in times of covid means you literally put your life on
the line doing the most mundane tasks that involve breathing in public. One day
you’re buying roast beef at the grocery store, sending a package at the post
office, eating potato salad in the park, or riding a subway, and 2 weeks later you’re
intubated with an oxygen mask saying goodbye to loved ones through a hospital
iPad held by strange nurses dressed in full protective gear.
To make myself feel better, I started researching the risks
of going to the dentist during covid. I read in some scientific papers that
dental cleaning generated aerosol water spray substantially dilutes any
potential viral presence…. I got a harebrained idea that to limit my exposure
to the delta variant I could alternate between holding my breath and breathing
through my mouth while the hygienist was cleaning my teeth. The water mists
would somehow form a protective vapor shield to guard me from airborne covid
nanoparticles.
I go to a dentist who sets up atypical shop in the basement floor of a brownstone with no individual rooms. Imagine the scene, there I sat in a deathtrap with 3 other reclined patients in one living room all with their mouths gaping wide
open spewing virus particles all over the place.
2 of the patients were teenagers with functioning thymuses and then there was an old
guy. I started thinking of how the studies in Israel show covid vaccine
protection wears off over time till it confers no prophylaxis in 6
months. if these guys were vaccinated in March then I was kind of screwed. If they
were vaccinated recently, that would be better… but then again Pfizer only
offers 72% protection against Delta so I was kind of screwed. the delta strain in nyc is 90% prevalent.... in my neighborhood
70% of people are vaccinated… so the chances that one was not vaccinated was
30%.... but then again, fully vaccinated people carry loads of virus as shown
by 73% of partyers in Provincetown who were shedding massive amounts of virus asymptomatically thereby spreading covid around cape cod. I read china did
extensive studies of contact tracing people riding trains next to infected passengers.
About 30% of the bystanders sitting in close proximity were infected after the
trip. But those studies were made when the wuhan strain was prevalent. So as I was trying to figure
out complex actuarial statistics and probabilities of my death in my head, the
dentist was scraping plaque and trying to chit chat with me like how I was doing in life, had I seen
any great movies lately, and so on.
I was kind of holding my breath so as not to breathe too
much over the course of the cleaning. I answered her tersely but politely, then
breathed through my mouth while the dentist water jet was causing me to gag
every few minutes. i imagined the 3 other patients looking over at me choking in
my dental chair, gasping for air. I was the one who looked and sounded like a covid infected patient.
2 weeks later, I somehow managed to escape the delta
variant, and survive gargling and choking to death on fluoridated water to
write this philosophical tale. Every day I wake up after potentially exposing
myself to a deadly virus and can breathe clearly, it’s like a blessing. I have
a gratitude for the small things in life. If I were thinking religiously, I would look up to
the sky and thank god that I had the opportunity to clean my teeth of stains,
didn’t have any cavities, and not have to visit the dentist again till next
year.
Then if I start thinking like a cold hard atheist, I wonder what compelled me to go to the dentist during a pandemic in the first
place? Who am I really, and what destructive force within me makes such reckless decisions like this? Some force within me just put my life on the line for a couple stains on my teeth. If I had died it would
have been the worst decision of my life. Indeed, Nietzsche summed it up in his Genealogy
of Morals quite succinctly
“We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people—we
are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there's good reason for that.
We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day
we'd discover our own selves? ….. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if
we were born winged creatures—collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts
we are basically concerned with only one thing, to "bring something home."
As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call
"experience"—which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough
time? In these matters, I fear, we've been "missing the point." Our
hearts have not even been engaged—nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've been
much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the
clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all
at once wakes up and asks himself "What exactly did that clock
strike?"—so we rub ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally
surprised and embarrassed "What have we really just experienced? And more:
"Who are we really?" Then, as I've mentioned, we count—after the
fact—all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our experience, our
lives, our being—alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So we remain
necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to
keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: "Each man
is furthest from himself." Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not knowledgeable
people.”
Two centuries later, Woody Allen took it one step further in Hannah and Her
Sisters and said, “Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and
over again. God – I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.”
We do things, we don’t know why we do them, and yet we do them over and over again.
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